Foxnews summarized a recent UN Population Fund report that elaborated on serious demographic problems in Asia, where men greatly outnumber women. Abortion, female infanticide, and trafficking are responsible for the missing girls:
Mosher, the first American social scientist allowed into China, puts much of the blame on Beijing's one-child policy, which took effect in 1979.
The policy encourages late marrying and late childbearing, and it limits the majority of urban couples to having one child and most of those living in rural areas to two. Female infanticide was the result, he said.
"Historically infanticide was something that was practiced in poor places in China," Mosher said. "But when the one-child policy came into effect we began to see in the wealthy areas of China, what had never been done before in history — the killing of little girls."
In recent years, female infanticide has taken a back seat to sex-selective abortion or female feticide, due to the advent of amniocentesis and ultrasound technology as well as other prenatal sex selection techniques, many of which are now readily available in clinics and doctors’ offices.
The article reports normally the sex ratio is 103–105 males per 100 females in any given society. In China, the gender ratio is 118 boys for every 100 girls with numbers reaching as high as 130 boys for every 100 girls in some regions. In India, where large dowries are still paid for marrying off girls, some provinces reported fewer than 900 girls per 1000 boys:
Abortion is legal in India under certain conditions, but sex-selective abortions or female feticide is a crime.
In 1994, the government enacted the Preconception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act (PC & PNDT), which prohibited those conducting such tests from telling or otherwise communicating to the woman or her family the sex of the fetus. The law was amended in 2003 to prohibit sex selection before or after conception.
"In recent years, prenatal sex selection and female feticide in India has increased," Singh said. "Though it is against the law for ultrasound technologies to be used to detect the sex of the child, it is still done illegally."
In 2006 a doctor and his assistant in the northern state of Haryana were sentenced to two years in jail and fined for revealing the sex of a female fetus and agreeing to abort it. It was the first time medical professionals were sentenced to jail time under the (PC & PNDT) Act. Three years earlier, a doctor in Punjab received a fine. Singh estimates that hundreds more cases are being investigated across the country and taken to court.
Unfortunately, there are disturbing signs that the practice of female infanticide and sex-selective abortion is not just limited to countries like Asia and China:
As China and India work toward solving their problems, Eberstadt points out that three large European countries are also showing disturbing signs.
"Greece, Macedonia and Yugoslavia betray some hints of prejudicial death rates for little girls in the post-war period," he said. While the numbers are very small, he notes they are "nonetheless curious and unusual.
"In the western hemisphere, Venezuela and El Salvador both have unnatural death rates for little girls and now also display unnatural sex ratios at birth," he continued.
Published reports point to problems among some immigrant groups in Canada as well. And even in the United States, Eberstadt said, some Asian-American populations have begun to "exhibit sex ratios at birth that could be considered biologically impossible."
As feminists, how do we balance the tension between advocating for reproductive rights that give women control over their lives when we know in many cultures, female infants still have such low value? Should abortion really have no restrictions whatsoever, as in places such as Canada? When combined with the ideology of multiculturalism, which does not judge other cultures’ values, it seems anti-feminist to allow the practice of abortion in cases of sex selection. It seems easy to rationalize a women’s right to choose in the earlier stages of pregnancy such as the first trimester, when the fetus does not look like a human being. It may represent human life, but it is debatable whether it is the same as a living, breathing human being, and thus negates the free will of another human being. But as pregnancy progresses and we clearly see it starting to resemble more and more of a human being, there’s something unsettling about unrestricted abortion. Both the pro-life and pro-choice movement have their extremes. The former tends to ignore the health and well-being of the mother, reducing her to functionality as a vehicle for delivering a baby. The latter tends to ignore the human fraility in how we exercise our freedoms, and its consequences within society. This will be an issue that remains with us for the foreseeable future, and will only intensify as technology paves the way for gender selection at conception.
